How we work
Youth Talk has helped hundreds of young people through tough times for over 20 years.
Right now, we are more determined than ever that every young person has professional support when they need it.
This is how our service works:
There are six steps:
Step 1 – You contact Youth Talk
To get access to our service you will need to contact us yourself. This is called self referral and is an important part of how we work because it keeps you in control. Just fill in our referral form or send us an email or give us a call.
Step 2 – Make an appointment
Our reception team is friendly and very experienced in helping young people to make their first appointment. They will contact you with an appointment time to talk and also send you some information about the service.
Step 3 – Your first meeting
Appointments are 50 mins long and will be with one of our experienced counsellors. It will be face to face or via telephone. When you meet, the counsellor will explain more about how we work and answer any initial questions you have. It’s your chance to tell them why you got in touch and what you want to achieve. We’ll also explain our data sharing policy (we have to do this) – you can download a copy here
If you’d like to know what the Youth Talk offices look like – take a tour
Step 4 – Finding the perfect match
After your first meeting our team will find you one of our counsellors to work with. It may be a different counsellor from the one you saw at your first meeting. As soon as we can get your first session we’ll contact you with more details. Being flexible and having good availability may help you to get a counselling appointment more swiftly.
Step 5 – Starting your counselling
Your counselling will take place at the same time and day with the same counsellor every week. After your first four sessions we can review how things are going. Together we can decide if things are going well and if it would be good to continue. If you and your counsellor think it would be good to continue, you can keep meeting at the same time and day each week.
Step 6 – Moving on from Youth Talk
When you and your counsellor feel you are ready you can talk about when and how to finish your counselling with us. We never just stop the sessions without talking it through with you first.
What about my parents?
Your counselling is confidential between you and Youth Talk. We do not talk to parents/guardians about any of our clients.
We have a fact sheet for parents/guardians as well as a section for parents on this website. You might like to share it with them – it provides information about what we do, how the counselling works and how they can best help you.
Without Youth Talk things would have continued to spiral and would have had no motivation to do any work for school or potentially even go to school
We are a charity
We need donations and support form our local community to keep supporting young people. If you know of someone that could support us or fundraise for us, please do contact us.
